Organ Pavilion's Monday Night Concert August 19 with Raúl Prieto Ramírez, Michael Gerdes and Chamber Orchestra a Winner

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, August 19) my husband Charles and I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the 10th of the 12 concerts in this year’s 36th annual Summer Organ Festival. This featured San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez along with 30 orchestral musicians under the direction of Michael Gerdes, director of orchestral studies at San Diego State University. Gerdes conducted a 32-piece pickup ensemble billed as “The Organ Pavilion Chamber Symphony,” which I suspect consisted of musicians from the San Diego Symphony as well as some of his students at San Diego State. The program consisted of two concerti for organ and string orchestra from the 18th century, an Organ Concerto in F by Georg Friedrich Handel (1685-1759) and another Organ Concerto in F (one wonders whether that was a congenial key for the organs of that time!) by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). Mixed in with those items were two works that used more of the usual instruments of a full symphony orchestra, including brass (mainly trumpets and French horns) and at least one kettledrum player. They were the Concerto for Organ and Orchestra in E-flat minor by Horatio Parker (1863-1919) and a Fantasia for Organ and Orchestra by Raúl Prieto Ramírez himself. The last made me a bit uneasy; between Raúl’s usually insufferable egomania and the dreadful works composed by San Diego’s last civic organist, Carol Williams, with which she made us suffer during the last year or two of her tenure, I was more than a little nervous about having to sit through a piece by Raúl.

As things turned out, he placed his piece second – between the Handel and the Haydn – and it was quite good in the dissonant-but-still-tonal mode that most of the best works of the second half of the 20th century have been. It reminded me a bit of Bartók and also of Bob Graettinger, whose remarkable classical/jazz fusion pieces for Stan Kenton’s “Innovations in Modern Music” orchestra in 1950-51 I’d just been listening to by pure coincidence. Michael Gerdes gave an announcement just before the Horatio Parker piece, in which he said that Parker had taught composition at Yale University for decades and his best-known student was Charles Ives. If you know the music of both men you’ll do the sort of double-take that a lot of art buffs do when they learn that landscape painter Thomas Hart Benton was Jackson Pollock’s teacher. There’s been only one commercial recording of the Parker organ concerto, and it came out in 1994 as a filler for a performance of Parker’s Latin-language oratorio, Hora Novissima. (There’s a more recent recording of the Parker organ concerto due to be released August 23 on the Naxos label, with Paul Jacobs as organist and Giancarlo Guerrero conducting the Nashville Symphony.) The 1994 recording got a double review in Fanfare magazine when it first came out, and David Johnson quoted Ives’s autobiography which said he learned a lot more about how to compose from his father, who led a semi-professional band in Ives’s hometown of Danbury, Connecticut, than he did from Parker. Apparently Parker had spent four years in Munich, Germany studying under Joseph Rheinberger, and had left with a dogged prejudice against most of what constituted “modern” music at the end of the 19th century. (That seems odd since Munich was the capital of Bavaria, home of King Ludwig II, a fervent Wagnerian who threw open the Bavarian treasury to underwrite Wagner’s productions in the last 20 years of Wagner’s lifetime. Another one of Rheinberger’s students, Engelbert Humperdinck – the one who wrote the opera Hansel und Gretel, not the 1960’s crooner who sang “Release Me” – later worked for Wagner as an assistant at Bayreuth.)

According to an autobiographical manuscript that wasn’t published until after Ives’s death, Ives said, “Parker was a bright man, a good technician, but apparently willing to be limited by what Rheinberger et al. and the German tradition taught him. After the first two or three weeks in freshman year, I didn't bother him with any of the experimental ideas that Father had been willing for me to think about, discuss, and try out. … An instance shows the difference between Father's and Parker's way of thinking. In the beginning of Freshman year, and getting assigned to classes, Parker asked me to bring him whatever manuscripts I had written. … Among them [was] a song, ‘At Parting’ — in it, some unresolved dissonances, one ending on a high E-flat in the key of G major, and stopping there unresolved. Parker said, ‘There's no excuse for that, an E-flat way up there and stopping, and the nearest D-natural way down two octaves’ — etc. I told Father what Parker said, and Father said, ‘Tell Parker that every dissonance doesn't have to resolve if it doesn't happen to feel like it, any more than every horse should have to have its tail bobbed just because it's the prevailing fashion.’” (I just listened to “At Parting” on a YouTube post, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0jOrjwHCKE, and it’s a song of emotional turmoil which Ives expressed beautifully with that dissonance. It reminded me of the daring dissonance with which John Lennon ended the Beatles’ song “Ticket to Ride,” also about a man coming to grips with a romantic breakup – and the “safe” major seventh Richard Carpenter used when The Carpenters covered the song.)

When Ives later submitted “a couple of fugues with the theme in four different keys, Parker took it as a joke. He was seldom mean, and I didn't bother him but occasionally after the first few months. He would just look at a measure or so and hand it back with a smile, or a joke about ‘hogging all the keys at one meal,’ and then talk about something else. I had and have great respect and admiration for Parker and most of his music. It was seldom trivial. His choral works have a dignity and depth that many of his contemporaries, especially in religious and choral composition, did not have. Parker had ideals that carried him higher than the popular, but he was governed too much by the German rule, and in some ways was somewhat hard-boiled.” Listening to Parker’s organ concerto last night, I was mightily impressed by Parker’s excellent craftsmanship, especially in the first and third movements, but at the same time a part of me longed for some Ivesian interruptions. Even a quote from “Yankee Doodle” or “Shall We Gather at the River?” in the middle of Parker’s well-crafted structures would have been nice. Raúl played two encores without the orchestra (who just sat on stage, waiting for him), both by Johann Sebastian Bach: an “Exercise for the Pedals Alone” and the Prelude in G, BWV 541. It was a fitting capstone to a quite remarkable musical evening, and with 32 orchestra players and a conductor to contend with Raúl’s usually overweening ego was kept in welcome check. He just made one announcement before he played his own piece, and it was brief, to the point and didn’t wander off into the maddening digressions he often goes through. Raúl announced that he’d written the piece when he was 25 (which, judging from the 1979 birthdate given for him in the program, would have dated it in 2004) and his wife, pianist Maria Teresa Sierra, had told him it was too dark and gloomy and he should revise it before playing it in public. I’m not sure what it would have sounded like before, because the piece was still dark and gloomy enough to please me and it sounded like it had real meat on its bones.